KARACHI, 6 June — Some 11,000 Habib Bank (HBL) employees will be laid off under a “golden handshake scheme” to make the bank more lucrative for buyers before it is offered for privatization. Sources said regional chiefs of the bank have started issuing dismissal letters to a large number of employees giving them only 12 days to wrap up and quit.
The letters inform the employees of the salient features of the “voluntary separation scheme” and ask them to avail of the same by June 16.
Officers have told their subordinates that if they do not avail of the scheme, they would be sacked. They have been told that it is going to be so because the bank management has decided to get rid of about 11,000 employees out of a total 22,000 to make the bank attractive for buyers.
The HBL is second on the privatization list of the government after the United Bank, and job cuts in both the banks are being backed by the World Bank under the second phase of banking sector reforms. In the first phase of reforms in 1997, the HBL had sent home 7,000 of its employees under the golden handshake scheme.
The sources said divisional and regional bank chiefs have received instructions from the head office to make sure that the dismissal letters addressed to selected employees were delivered to them within three days — by June 6.
People leaving the HBL under the scheme are entitled to get an amount equal to 2.75 months’ basic pay for each completed years of service or an amount equal to 1.25 months’ basic pay for each remaining months of the service — whichever is less: in any case it does not exceed 90 months’ basic pay.
